, 1887-09-28
'SCONSET BY THE SEA.
PRENTICE MILFORD ON A PHASE OF
WATERING PLACE LIFE.

Summer Camps Along the Atlantic Sea-
shore-ouiet Charm OF Nantucket-Lifs
in the CottaGe-ouIet and Unpreten-
tious EnJoyment-Hotel Life.
There is a great change going on as re-
CARDS the manner of life at the watering
places on the Atlanti seaboard. 1t com
menced some fifteen or twenty years ago,
when the seaside camp meeting system
begun and the Methodists and Baptists
first caught the idea that they could COM
bine religion, health, n wrestle with the
ocean and a ~protracted meeting at one and
the same time. That led to the estab-
lishment of the great UNCONVENTIONAL and
religious summer camps at Ocean Grove
and Asbury Park, just below Long
Branch on the Jersey coast, Cottage City
on Martha's Vineyard, where one-third of
the Rev. De Witt Talmage's congregation
have recently been rusticating and swim
ming, and several other smaller camps.
The S~piritualists also tumbled TO this
fact, and are now every summer located
thousands strong at Onset bay on the
Massachusetts coast and Lake Pleasant in
the interior of that state, where they live
in tents or cheap cottages and receive
communications of all sorts through their
mediums from the higher and lower
heavens. In fact, this summer seaside
camping is extending and gradually fill
ing up every convenient point on the At
lantic coast from Maine to Maryland.
ALONG THE SHORE.
Twenty-Five years ago the south shore
of Long Island was little occupied in this
way. Today there is almost a continuous
string of summer cottages, hotels and
club houses from Brooklyn to the COM
mencement of the peninsula of Montauk.
The sporting clubse especially are apt to
take large slices of land, and as in cases
they have bought it cheap, theirs is likely
to prove a good investment. Besides, 1t
Is becoming more and more ''the thing'
for every city man who makes any pre-
tension to style to have his summer cot
tage somewhere though it be no more
than a tent with a board floor or a house
woode as to frame and covered with cot
ton drilling, like those we used to run up
in the mines, and in which we added to
the commercial prosperity of the state of
California by drinking corn whisky and
piling the empty bottles in cords without
the door.
a yearly increasing number of people
who visit the seaside during the summer
have come to discard the hotel and take
to the cheaper and more informal cottage.
They hire them for the season, furnished.
The business of building and letting fur
nished seaside cottages is increasing. The
system Is also superseding the summer
hotel. People live far cheaper and, for
that matter, far more informally and
consequently easier at their cottages than
ut the hotels. They do not need to dress
for dinner or other occasions two or three
times u day. They bring with them their
own help, buy their own provisions, cook
their own meals, invite what friends they
may without much additional expense,
disrobe for their ocean baths Mt their
homes, walk down to the beach in their
bathing suits and walk back again drip
ping wet. This kline of life brings people
nearer together and rub off a good deal
of unnecessary stiffness. The people who
so live are by no means always those of
limited means. In Underhill's system of
relatively cheap furnished cottages here
at Siasconset, he has among his tenants
even New York millionaires, who take re-
spectively for the summer little one
stored, many chambered houses, which
cost him, furnished, from 5000 to 81, 200
apiece. They are neatly and ta%stefully
supplied with beds, all necessary table and
cooking furniture, c~onveniences for wash
ing, in fact, with everything needed for a
housekeeping family to a pepper box, and
rent from 500 to $500 for the season.